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Artisan secures $25 million in Series A funding to expand its development of autonomous AI employees, starting with outbound sales. Its AI BDR, Ava, independently handles lead generation, outreach, and meeting booking using real-time context and buying signals. The company adopts a performance-based pricing model and plans to launch additional AI roles to form a complete AI-powered sales system.
The $25M Boost That Fuels Artisan’s Big AI Bet
Artisan announces a $25 million Series A funding round led by Glade Brook Capital. The round includes participation from HubSpot Ventures, Oliver Jung, Day One Ventures, BOND, Soma Capital, Sequoia Scout, and others. Y Combinator also joins the round again after backing Artisan previously.
The funding supports Artisan’s goal of creating AI employees that take over repetitive workflows, beginning with outbound sales. The company positions itself as building new work software, not layering AI on top of outdated tools.
Jaspar Carmichael-Jack, co-founder of Artisan, confirmed that this capital will accelerate product development and expand the Artisan workforce beyond outbound functions.
Why Sales Teams Still Waste Hours on Repetitive Work
Artisan’s founding thesis is that significant amounts of human potential are wasted in daily workflows. Roles across industries involve tasks that can be replaced: prospecting leads, formatting CRM data, rewriting emails, and copy-pasting information.
The company frames these duties not as inefficiencies, but as outdated labor that should be eliminated entirely. Artisan’s approach focuses on building AI to independently handle such work, aiming to improve both output and employee time allocation.
Meet Ava, the AI BDR Who Books Meetings Without a Human Touch
Artisan’s first AI employee is Ava, a Business Development Representative. Ava automates the entire outbound sales process—finding leads, researching them, crafting personalized outreach, sending messages across email and LinkedIn, and scheduling meetings.
Ava does not operate as an assistant. She functions independently using a multi-agent system and a real-time context engine. These technologies track external buying signals like leadership changes, job postings, and funding rounds. Ava uses this information to reach out at the most opportune moment with relevant messaging.
Companies using Ava, including SumUp, report 8–15 positive replies per week from small businesses without expanding their sales teams. Ava’s capabilities deliver consistent and qualified outreach outcomes.
Autonomy in Action: How Artisan Builds AI That Actually Does the Job
Artisan measures success through an internal framework that evaluates AI autonomy levels. The company distinguishes between assistance and actual task ownership.
Ava originally operated under human supervision (Level 1). Today’s version (Level 2) performs prospecting and outreach independently. Ava can write and send communications without manual review or intervention.
Artisan is now working toward Level 3, where Ava will be able to manage multi-step outbound strategies, adapt to live campaign data, and optimize for pipeline performance without oversight.
The long-term vision includes Level 5 autonomy, in which Artisan’s AI employees outperform humans across both hard and soft skills traditionally required in sales roles.
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Why Artisan Only Gets Paid When Results Happen
Artisan introduces a performance-based pricing model through a partnership with Paid.ai, a company founded by Outreach’s Manny Medina.
Customers do not pay based on usage or licenses. Instead, Artisan charges only when its AI employees deliver quantifiable outcomes. These include booked meetings, lead conversations, and active sales pipeline growth.
This model ties client cost directly to performance, creating alignment between Artisan’s delivery and customer ROI.
Intent Becomes the New Standard for Outbound Sales
Traditional outbound strategies rely on volume and timing that often misaligns with buyer readiness. Artisan replaces these tactics with intent-based automation tools.
The platform now includes:
- Web Visitor ID: Identifies anonymous site visitors and initiates outreach based on browsing behavior
- Watchtower Campaigns: Tracks the web for actionable buyer signals and automates outreach in response
- CRM Nurture: Re-engages old leads by referencing past conversations with dynamic follow-ups
These features aim to eliminate irrelevant and poorly timed outreach by reacting to real-time signals that suggest a higher likelihood of engagement.
Ava Is Just the Start: A Glimpse Into the Expanding AI Workforce
Artisan plans to expand its AI workforce beyond outbound roles. The company will soon release:
- Aaron: An AI Inbound SDR to qualify and route incoming leads
- Aria: An AI Meeting Assistant to manage scheduling, reminders, and post-call summaries
These additions will integrate with the Artisan Sales Platform to form a full-stack AI sales system. The roadmap also includes eventual expansion into marketing, customer success, and other business functions.
Artisan Redefines Work by Designing AI to Be Colleagues, Not Just Tools
Artisan presents itself as a new category of work software. The company rejects the current norm of fragmented SaaS tools and labor-intensive processes.
AI employees, built to complete end-to-end tasks, are positioned as team members rather than support utilities. The company emphasizes autonomy, accountability, and role-specific performance for its AI agents.
To support this, Artisan recently hired Ming Li as CTO. Li previously held leadership roles at Deel, Rippling, TikTok, and Google. He joins four senior engineers from Rippling to expand Artisan’s AI architecture and accelerate the development of new AI roles.
Artisan’s focus is to replace manual workflows with systems that scale without requiring additional human labor—an approach the company describes not as future-facing, but designed for current business needs.
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